


Respite

by flyingisland



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: First Time, M/M, Penetrative Sex, Post Season Four, Post Season Six, Post canon, trans keith
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-30
Updated: 2018-08-19
Packaged: 2019-05-31 09:45:33
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 14,762
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15116807
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/flyingisland/pseuds/flyingisland
Summary: Lance and Keith finally get some much-needed alone time.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [GrapieBee](https://archiveofourown.org/users/GrapieBee/gifts).



> A very, very special thanks to [paladongs](https://twitter.com/paladongs) for the beautiful art featured in this story!

The castle-ship at night, at times like these, reminds Keith of all of Lance’s stories about pressing seashells to his ear and listening to the sounds of the ocean when he was not a Paladin, or a warrior, or a hero, but just a child learning to love the world on the sandy coast of Cuba.

It’s a dark and empty thing, this ship. It’s whirring with the sounds of a distant life that Keith can almost image existing here in the day, under the artificial, fluorescent lights flickering on through the halls, in the vast dining room, in the hologram room where Kalternecker munches endlessly on the thick bales of grass that Lance collects for her.

Keith had felt, when revisiting this husk of a life that he might as well have lived three centuries ago, as though he’d only been allowed to feel the phantoms of the hustle and bustle that at one point existed—at one point might exist again—without the hope of ever seeing this castle thriving with life in the day. When the morning comes and the ghosts who haunt their silent bedrooms might peer out of those doors, groggy and listless and entirely too exhausted to face yet another day of this terrible war. Keith will be gone by then. Keith will have ventured back with the Blades, after today’s fight with the Galra, after the surrender of Lotor into their care, after he, himself, had barely avoided obliterating his tiny ship against the partic barrier surrounding Haggar and her soldiers.

Today feels like a dream. It feels distant and unreal. And in the morning, he isn’t entirely sure where these surreal decisions and happenings might lead him.

But in this fold of time, between yesterday and tomorrow, between evening and the morning that will lead him back to the Blade of Marmora—here, he finds himself tangled together on Lance’s bed, with Lance, of course, kissing tiny trails from the center of his chest down to the brush of hair growing thicker just below his navel.

Lance is taking great care in ghosting his lips over every scar that he’s missed since Keith went away. He’s fanning out his fingers over Keith’s belly, pressing the pads of them so gently into his skin that Keith barely feels him at all. There’s a moistness between Keith’s legs that he reminds himself not to be embarrassed about. His body’s wants and needs aren’t anything to be ashamed of, Lance had told him once. When the two of them had found themselves in another private situation like this one, and Lance had sneaked those long-fingered hands down the front of his pants and stroked him there.

“Everyone deserves to feel good,” Lance had told him, “Even you. _Especially_ you.”

Keith pretends that he can’t remember that moment. He pretends that these thoughts and Lance’s persistent consideration of his precarious emotional state haven’t been the sole star guiding him through months of agonizing missions, so far away from the family that he’s made here.

But Lance, now, is gazing up at him. His eyes are glassy and his frown is tight. His shoulders haven’t entirely eased out the stress of today’s battle, and while Keith can’t find the right words to articulate these thoughts, he knows that something is wrong.

Keith’s eyes, feeling too sensitive, as though he’s staring straight up at the sun, flick over to the strange packet sitting just left of Lance’s elbow on the bed. He can barely discern the text that’s written over the front, can identify only the roughest translation from Galra text to English, but Lance had told him what it was earlier. He’d bragged with shaky bravado as he’d procured it from under his mattress, as he’d wagged it in Keith’s face with pink cheeks and hands that had been entirely too unsteady to convince Keith that he hadn’t been just as nervous about the prospect of this as Keith himself is.

Condoms, Lance had told him proudly, “Genuine Galra-brand condoms! You wouldn’t believe the variety that those guys have! Can you imagine what they’re packing down there?”

Keith had scoffed at him. He’d called him gross. And Lance had laughed, because Lance never takes anything too seriously, never takes any of Keith’s brusqueness to heart. Never misunderstands Keith’s intentions now that he’s finally managed to get inside of his head. Keith imagines that someone like Lance never forgets anything that he learns about a person. He imagines that Lance just cares more about everyone than maybe they even deserve.

And he imagines that _he_ doesn’t deserve Lance, but he doesn’t say so, because he knows that Lance wouldn’t let that one rest, no matter how long it took for him to convince Keith otherwise.

As it is, they’ve talked about this. Lance had asked him if he was ready to go all the way weeks ago, the last time that they’d met each other face to face. It had been nice to see Lance again, without the pretense of new battle plans, in the flesh without his features skewed by the static on a screen. Smiling, instead of standing just behind Shiro, looking curiously downtrodden, as though there’s more trouble among the team than Keith’s leaving could have ever remedied.

His answer, at the time, had been yes. He knows that he can change his mind at any point now and Lance will accept that rejection with dignity and grace and a kindness devoid of any annoyance that he wonders if he would have to fear from anyone else.

Keith, unfortunately, doesn’t have anyone to compare Lance to. He’s never loved anyone before. But he feels, deep down, that maybe Lance is still better than anyone else anyway. Maybe Lance is the only person capable of making his heart race, his head spin, and of framing life in a way that only makes perfect sense to the two of them.

He doesn’t like how romantic he’s feeling tonight. Lance, now, is kissing further down, tugging the waistband of his boxers further and further until they’re tangled around his knees.

Lance’s face is warm between his thighs, his tongue a hot piston springing waves of pleasure under his skin. Keith feels akin to fire now, feels his back arching and his fingers threading too hard through Lance’s hair. But Lance moans into him. Lance presses a single finger inside, wriggles it around playfully, pushes it up in time with a lap of his tongue and drinks in all of the muted noises that Keith is struggling so hard to keep contained behind his teeth.

It’s been a long time since Keith has been touched like this, as few and far between as their more physical interactions have been. He isn’t as surprised by his sudden orgasm as he is flustered, but Lance is quick to wipe off his mouth on the back of his hand, and lean forward to press a reassuring kiss against Keith’s lips.

“I like knowing that I can do that,” he says, and it’s _all_ that he says, for once, without the usual tactlessness that Keith knows would only ruin the mood now.

He begins to ask if Keith is sure about this, even as he’s pulling back and settling himself precariously on one knee, balanced awkwardly as he reaches over to grasp at the Galra packaging and tear a single piece of the bundle loose.

Keith cuts him off just a little bit too quickly, “I haven’t changed my mind.”

Lance’s smile isn’t quite as brilliant as it usually is. It’s a little rusty around the edges, a little war-torn, a little tired. Keith knows that something is wrong, but he doesn’t know if he’ll ever find the right moment to ask.

Instead of speaking, he watches silently as Lance tears open the packet between trembling fingers. Keith himself is alive with nerves now. He spreads his legs, then closes them tighter. He realizes that he doesn’t know what to do with his hands. Lance flounders awkwardly for a moment when he realizes that he should have pulled off his own underwear, but Keith, eager for something to do, shoots forward so quickly that his head swims just a little and tugs them down around Lance’s knees.

“U-uh, yeah, thanks,” Lance mutters, color darkening under his skin, “Are you—”

“I’m sure. Are _you_ sure?”

Lance chokes a laugh.

“Y-yeah,” he says quietly, rolling the condom over himself, over that part of him that Keith’s still too embarrassed to allow his eyes to linger on for too long, “I’ve only been wanting to do this since like, the first time I saw you.”

The laughter that spills out of Keith is so croaky and unpracticed that he knows that he must sound like an animatronic huffing through the last of its battery life. He knows that he must look stupid to Lance now, as a scared and confused person, as someone who doesn’t know what it means to love someone. As a man who can’t decide if pleasure is more terrifying than the pain that he’s accustomed to, as a person who still flounders at the mere concept that someone could ever love him enough to want to do this with him.

But Lance’s smile returns, bashfully. Keith remembers the expression that his father would sometimes get while listening to his favorite song on their dusty old record player. He remembers how the people in the scarce amount of movies that he’s seen would gaze upon each other before leaning forward to kiss, or to embrace, or to admit their undying affections to one another, only for the screen to fade to black.

That implication, he thinks, that life ends happily after a person falls in love, he knows that it isn’t true, but sometimes he believes it. Sometimes, when Lance is looking down at him as though he’s nothing short of his favorite music, his favorite movie, his favorite _anything,_ Keith deludes himself into thinking that this is a perfect life. This is a happy ending.

And tomorrow won’t come. Their screen will fade into that hopeful dark. The universe will be saved if only because two people loved each other very, very much. And life, he thinks, will be nothing but fuzzy, eternal bliss. They’ll live perpetually in that moment just before the credits begin to scroll over that blank screen. They’ll survive, forever, on only the love that they share for one another.

It’s a dumb thought, a dumb dream, but it’s the one that he holds for himself, and Lance, nonetheless.

Lance is steadying himself on hands and knees on top of Keith now. He’s sliding one palm against the mattress, stopping only when he bumps into Keith’s hand. Keith’s fingers open, he averts his gaze from Lance’s face. He doesn’t know if this is supposed to hurt or not. He doesn’t know any more about the human body than he does about the Galra, or the Olkarion, or any other strange, alien life form that they’ve come across in their travels thus far.

“Are you ready?” Lance asks him, so close that his breath feels like steam against Keith’s face.

Keith nods, staring off into the shadows of Lance’s messy room. He croaks out an affirmation, a weak, shaky, _“I’m ready”_ that sounds as though it isn’t even his voice in his own ears.

And he feels Lance, pressing against him, breaching something inside of him that sends a small trickle of discomfort straight through his lower belly. He pushes out a hard breath, knitting his brows together as Lance leans further forward to rest his lips over Keith’s in a long, lazy kiss.

“Y-you okay?” Lance’s voice is baited with heavy breathing. His long lashes are low, splayed out over his pink-tinted cheeks. “Y-you… you feel really… really nice.”

Those words cause more heat to blossom up under his cheeks. He feels as though he’s been engulfed in flame, as though he’s burning now, in the oven of Lance’s skin on his skin, Lance’s lips on his lips. As though he’s trapped here now, simmering, and he isn’t sure if he’ll ever want to get away.

He makes some throaty attempt at an affirmation, jerking his head slightly down, then up. Lance accepts that without argument, without demand for more solid consent after how many times he’s reassured him now, and for that, Keith is thankful. Keith has a lot of trouble articulating his thoughts even at the best of times. He finds it nearly impossible to say anything coherent at moments like these, when Lance is so close and touching him so gently. When another person is invading the invisible barrier that he’s built up around himself, when someone is touching him and it’s _good_ —when it feels pleasurable, even, in place of everything that his body has learned to expect from contact so close that someone else could hurt him.

Lance is easing further inside. His hand inches upward, his palm sticky with sweat as he slides it up over Keith’s. Their fingers lace together, Keith muffles a moan against Lance’s wet lips. And Lance is inside of him, finally, after all of this time. After so many weeks and months and years of the two of them never quite connecting. After so many missed opportunities coming together at completely the wrong time.

Lance loves him, Keith knows this. It’s been too long to deny it anymore.

And Lance pulls out, slowly, carefully. He takes his time. He presses back in gradually, paceless, at slow intervals that skitter something white hot and sensitive deep down in Keith’s belly.

Keith staggers a breath. Lance holds his hand ever-tighter.

They move together, at this slow pulse. Keith drinks in the way that Lance is mumbling moans, how his breath hitches desperately in his throat. He watches the cute pink splashed against Lance’s skin grow a darker, deeper scarlet. He watches Lance’s glassy eyes watching him.

“I—I love you,” Lance says, hushed, shaky. He’s hitching his hips just a little bit quicker, more shallowly. His hand in Keith’s is shaking harder than it was before. “I love you s-so much.”

And Keith, feeling on the threshold of something now, feeling a tension building inside of him, a warmth spanning out within him, crawling up from his belly into his chest, he leans upward, shudders out another breath, and whispers, “Lance, I… I love you too.”

It’s almost funny, that Lance finishes at this moment. It’s almost symbolic in a way, that he’d choose this opportunity to allow Keith to push him over the edge. It’s almost weird, almost entirely too good to be true. Almost unbelievable, that Lance shudders and shakes, that he rattles out a low moan and Keith can feel him twitching inside, can feel the way that his fingers stutter in Keith’s hand, how his body arches, then laxes against him in a moment so quick that it’s over before Keith can catalog the new sensation of it.

But Keith doesn’t feel much like laughing right now, not when his body feels so hot. He doesn’t feel like teasing Lance, like drawing more attention to Lance’s unintentional display of the extent of his affections, and so Keith just lies still. He allows Lance to lean against him until he catches his breath, to stay buried inside of him before he pushes himself up on one hand, still holding Keith’s in the other, and pulls himself slowly out.

Finally, Lance pulls his hand away. Keith distracts himself by staring up at the dark ceiling as Lance’s weight eases off of the bed. He listens to the sounds of Lance fumbling around in the shadows, struggling to discard the condom now that their moment is over, and he’s surely realizing that he didn’t plan this nearly as well as he’d thought.

Again, Keith almost laughs. But right now, his emotions feel so strangely saturated that he feels as though, if he tried, he might cry instead.

He doesn’t like the feeling of being tethered so tightly to another person. He doesn’t like feeling as though he might never be okay, if Lance were to go away. It’s terrifying, he thinks, to find himself wrapped so comfortably around another person’s finger. To know, with absolute certainty, that now that Lance has breached the walls built up around his heart and truly reached him, he’ll never be the same.

“I need to tell you something.” Lance’s voice is even, tense when his weight returns to the side of the bed. Within moments, his hand is on Keith’s cheek, turning his face over, but lingering there long after Keith turns to look at him.

Keith feels his nerves immediately bundling in his chest. He feels himself on edge, only moments after he’d felt as though his muscles might not ever work correctly again.

“That thing you did today—that’s not okay.”

Oh, right. The battle. He wasn’t sure if Lance really figured it out or not. When he’d manned that ship, when he’d barreled out into the battlefield to do whatever he could to save the universe with Voltron pinned under the barrier on that treacherous planet.

Lotor had come to his aide, just in time. But if not…

He hadn’t thought that Lance would hear about it. He hadn’t thought of the ripples of that action, the effect that it might have on Lance. He hadn’t considered when the moment to act had been speeding by so quickly, that he might be leaving behind someone who would actually miss him once he was gone.

And now, he isn’t entirely sure how Lance knows. He doesn’t know how Lance, or himself, are allowed to feel.

He flicks his gaze away.

“Keith.” Lance’s hand is pushing against his cheek, urging his eyes back onto his face. But it feels too raw to look at him. It feels as though something is boiling inside of him now, and if he risks a look in Lance’s direction and sees the hurt in those dark, wide eyes, he isn’t sure what he’ll do. “Keith, please… I just…”

Lance’s voice is cracking. He’s whispering now. His words are wet, his hand is warm and soft.

“I can’t do this without you.”

And Lance is drawing him up into his arms. Lance is holding him close as he shakes and shakes, as those quiet noises escape him that Keith couldn’t ever hope to understand. But that feeling of lingering on the edge of something terrifying, it never goes away.

The feeling, as though he’s being burned alive happily, it never fades completely from his skin.

But Keith allows his slack arms to wind around Lance. He allows his voice to be tender and quiet when he whispers in Lance’s ear.

When he hears those hiccups, when he feels Lance’s heart beating so steadily against his chest.

He knows that he can’t do this without Lance either.

He knows that he’ll never be the same, now that Lance has breached his surface. Now that Lance has stumbled in and rearranged everything, and this new order—these new things that he’s learning about himself, about other people—everything suddenly makes so much more sense than it ever did before.

“I—I’m sorry,” Keith tells him, “I love you, I… I’m sorry.”

He can’t ever say it enough. Not enough to truly express to Lance how terribly, desperately he means it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello there! This story was a request from the wonderful and charming [spoiledspine](https://spoiledspine.tumblr.com) on tumblr!  
> I really love writing tender klance, so this one was a lot of fun! So I hope you enjoyed reading it as well!
> 
> Before I go, I had [a nice song](https://youtube.com/watch?v=DcuC8_NoeFU) that I listened to basically the entire time that I was writing this.
> 
> And, with that, thank you so much for reading!
> 
> [tumblr](https://curionabang.tumblr.com), [twitter](https://twitter.com/MothIsland)


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A special thanks to my amazing betas: [traffy](http://oneyedkaneking.tumblr.com) and [mai](http://bluest-paladin.tumblr.com)!

Keith stokes the fire in the middle of their makeshift campground, knees bent as he leans down to stab the broken stick that he’d salvaged some ways away in this perpetual wasteland before stepping back, dropping it to the ground, and taking a seat next to Shiro once again. Shiro is in a seemingly endless state of half-awareness, newly freed from his time in the healing pod, hoping to get some fresh air and sunlight before they embark on a long, perilous journey back to the home that knew all of them before they first stumbled into this war.  
  
Keith takes a moment, every moment that he can now, to fret over Shiro. He dots his forehead with a damp cloth, wet from the pouch that Coran had handed him earlier in the evening. He notes the sweat that has accumulated there, asks Shiro if he’s really ready to be outside, or if maybe he needs more time to heal.   
  
Shiro cracks a small smile, his lashes bleached against pale skin.   
  
“I’ll be okay,” Shiro tells him, a weak hand waved in the air in the general direction of Hunk and Pidge chatting quietly on the other side of the fire, “They’re keeping an eye on me. Why don’t you go to bed?”   
  
Keith wants to object, but then Shiro’s dark eyes are opening, ever-so-slightly. That smile is widening across his cheeks. There’s color there, too, a soft peach that brightens the shallow, deathly shade of him that Keith has agonized over since he came back to them. He seems to be coming alive, for this moment, as he rests his head against the driftwood that the group of them had dragged back here to make their seating.   
  
“He’s been missing you this whole time,” Shiro says then, his eyes focused on the distant stars, the gases of this atmosphere, a point in the universe where he must see _something_ —some distant memory of a conversation that Keith must not have been around for. And, really, neither was he. “The other me had a lot of conversations with him about you.”   
  
Keith swallows thickly, his brows knitting tight together. He ignores the heat rising to his own cheeks, tugs his hand away from Shiro’s forehead, and drags in a sharp breath and pretends that he isn’t feeling anything right now.   
  
Shiro sees through him, as he always has. But his hand then—big and soft, warm and reassuring—Keith thinks that it might forever be the push that he needs in the right direction.   
  
If Shiro is Keith’s guiding North star, then Keith isn’t sure what that makes Lance.   
  
Maybe his universe. Maybe his everything.   
  
Maybe the welcoming black gaps of a galaxy between constellations—a big and overwhelming thing to explore, to come home to—that Keith knows that he’ll never be able to understand completely, no matter how much time he spends among it.   
  
He leaves Shiro with a gentle pat on the shoulder. He tells him to get some rest and to tell one of the others if he needs to go back inside.   
  
A “thank you” is hidden in there somewhere. Somewhere between the short gap of silence, before he slips away.   
  
And Shiro hears it, he always does. His “you’re welcome” is offered in the motion of his weak wave, his small, knowing laughter, and how comfortable he makes himself laying there alone so that Keith can finally start mending the relationship that he’s left hanging in disarray since he came back.   
  
Keith isn’t sure when he got to this point, after everything that he’s ever run away from, where people exist who he’d truly do anything in his power not to lose.   
  
And now, it doesn’t scare him nearly as much as it used to. Now, as he creeps through the darkness in search of the Red Lion slumbering some ways away, he realizes that it feels more like a warm, comforting blanket.   
  
He shakes his head, chasing away those thoughts. A younger version of himself wouldn’t have trusted anyone to take care of Shiro. He wouldn’t have thought that a single person in the universe was capable of appreciating him for all that he was, all that he could do, all that someone like Shiro could be. He’d been the only person to Keith for such a substantial amount of time—a mentor and a shining example of what he someday hoped to be. An unattainable goal set out before him, and eventually, an obsession that led him from a school that he loved, from a dream that he cherished, and banished him out into what might as well be another universe—waging this war so far away from a destitute, unloving home filled with strangers who he knows now could never have understood him.   
  
But he’s grown, and he’s met so many people. And he’s fallen into love with a person who makes all of the jumbled things click neatly into place. Keith thinks about his life before Lance as nothing but a monochrome puzzle. The pieces were impossible to place together, and he didn’t even know what sort of picture it might make in the end. And a younger version of himself might not understand this either, might laugh at the mere concept of allowing someone like Lance close enough to hurt him.   
  
But fate and war, loss, and love, they’ve had a way of making the impossible plausible, of giving him family to fill his loneliness. Of giving him a purpose in place of fear, or anger, or doubt.   
  
He owes these people everything. He owes Lance an explanation.   
  
He still doesn’t know how long in normal universal time he’s been gone. And he still feels guilty for being so rude to Lance when he came back—no matter how much, he thinks with a wry smile, Lance might have kind of deserved it.   
  
But their relationship shouldn’t be built on who’s winning, or who says the meanest things. It shouldn’t be about the back and forth, or the fighting, or the leaving and someday maybe coming back. Keith doesn’t plan on running away again. This Shiro—the real Shiro—trusts Voltron in only his hands. And Keith is stronger now, physically, and mentally. He understands what he must have doubted before. He won’t hesitate this time instead of making a move. He won’t hurt the one person who he’s ever loved in this very particular way anymore, after leaving him, and confusing him, and breaking the one promise that Lance had begged him to keep—again, and again, and again.   
  
Guilt roils inside of him. He feels lightheaded with it, drunk off of his own self-pity and carefully concocted misery. Allura had told him earlier about their missions while he was away. She’d told him a secret that no one else on the team had heard thus far.   
  
_“Shiro isn’t the first person who I’ve brought back from the dead.”_ She’d looked guilty when she’d told him, flicked her eyes away with teeth digging into her bottom lip. Her eyes had been glassy then, unfocused and turned away at some shadow in the dark night. Keith didn’t hesitate before reaching out a hand and placing it on her shoulder. This contact, he’d learned from his mother. This method of comforting a person without having to use words. _“He made me promise not to tell anyone. With Shiro acting so strangely, he thought that it might cause even more panic among our group.”_   
  
Self-sacrificing, at one point, would never have been a word that he’d have used to describe someone like Lance. But an altruistic leader hadn’t been either—or a selfless friend, a tender lover, an irreplaceable pilot.   
  
Lance, over time, had become all of those things. Lance, he knows, has grown too.   
  
And the two of them seem to have grown tangled around one another. Like vines over the limbs of dying trees—like flora grown through cracked concrete, like life rebuilding after charred, blackened death. But he wonders now if he’ll recognize Lance, if Lance will recognize him. If the last two years have been too hard on him and if he’s grown too big and too strange and hard to remember. If Lance himself has matured into a man too wise to continue whatever messy thing has been going on between them in the time between universe-saving and Blade of Marmora missions.   
  
He knocks on the Red Lion’s nose. And he apologizes shortly after for doing so—still feeling the most subtle tingles of his connection to it, and wondering how he might feel if one of Allura’s mice were to wake him up by rapping their tiny knuckles against his face.   
  
But the eyes light up, the mouth opens slowly. He isn’t sure if Lance moved the controls to wake it, or if maybe Red has just decided that the two of them finally having a moment alone together is well worth being roused from sleep in the middle of the night—rudely, too, he thinks. He apologizes one more time, stepping into that mighty jaw and ambling through the throat into the hangar.   
  
The door slides open quickly, with nothing but a hiss of the electronics and a small whoosh of air. He’s still squinting in the brighter light, still growing accustomed to the glare of the fluorescents compared to the thick night outside. And he wonders what Lance is doing in here if not sleeping, and when he became the sort of person who enjoyed his time alone. If maybe he’ll walk in on Lance having set up some romantic scene for the two of them: the tiger skin rug, the twin flutes of champagne, the carefully assorted plate of foreign cheeses, or whatever other corny nonsense he can remember from the handful of romantic movies that he’s seen in his lifetime.   
  
But Lance is doing none of that, and he doesn’t swivel around in his chair, pretending to read a book while smoking a pipe. He isn’t feigning some exercise routine, or doing much of anything that he might think would impress Keith, even if they both know that it won’t.   
  
Kalternecker is still outside somewhere—grazing, maybe. Napping, more likely. But the hangar still lingers with the smell of a barn, and it takes Keith a moment of scrunching his nose to grow more accustomed to it.   
  
Maybe they’re due for some trips to another space mall so Lance can buy some candles and air freshener. It’s going to be a long trip back home if he’s carting perhaps the smelliest pet in the universe behind him the entire way.   
  
“Are you gonna say something, or just stand in the doorway all night?”   
  
Lance doesn’t turn around in the pilot’s seat, and Keith is reminded with sudden clarity that it doesn’t actually swivel around. And he wonders, despite how startled he is by the abrupt introduction of words into the thick silence, if perhaps Lance would have done just that, had Pidge altered his seat in order for it to do so. He wonders if Lance is considering how much more atmospheric this scene might have been if he’d been able to introduce himself to this conversation like some kind of Bond villain stroking a fluffy, white cat.   
  
He bites his lip, stepping far enough into the room that the door is finally able to slide closed behind him.   
  
“I just thought I should check on you,” he says, a half-lie, but true enough that he doesn’t stumble over his words, “Everyone else is outside.”   
  
He can hear Lance’s long exhale, can see the most subtle reflection of his face in the darkened window, looking out into the night, away from the fire and their camp, into nothing but blackness. He wonders what Lance might have seen out there. He wonders which thoughts had filled all of the empty nothing that this window had provided for him.   
  
And finally, after a long, torturous moment, Lance turns around, cranes his neck, and offers him a flat smile.   
  
“A lot has happened,” he says, “I’m just kind of tired.”   
  
Keith swallows, nodding slowly. He’s wringing his hands, tapping one foot to expend some of the nervous energy bubbling up inside of him, and taking a moment to gaze around the hangar. Lance’s entire life on the castle-ship exists here now. Everything worth bringing along with him is piled up against the walls. It’s not as jam-packed as Pidge’s, and far more organized than Hunk’s. He thinks that it must exist somewhere on the spectrum between his own emptiness and everyone else’s mess, and he wonders, briefly, what Lance might have left behind.   
  
“You’ve changed,” he says, without really thinking about it. Without any control over the words slipping past his lips.   
  
Lance cracks a laugh, pushing the pilot’s seat further away from the control panel. Keith isn’t sure how he feels about the fact that his mind goes first to the realization that now, someone else might be able to fit in his lap.   
  
He forces down those thoughts. Around the collar, he suddenly feels very warm.   
  
“That’s rich coming from you,” Lance says then, grinning in a way that feels fabricated. Dishonest. Keith makes a point of not mentioning how wrong it looks. He thinks that maybe, for whatever reason, Lance needs to pretend now that everything is okay. “You’re almost like a completely different person.”   
  
“I’m better now.”   
  
“There wasn’t anything wrong with you before.”   
  
Keith clicks his tongue, but despite his newfound frustration, he moves further towards Lance. He stops only when the two of them are within a foot of each other, only when he could conceivably reach out and touch Lance, just like he’s been itching to since he first stepped off of that tiny escape pod with Romelle and his mother. But he dithers now because Lance doesn’t look happy, even as he smiles. He doesn’t seem okay with any of this, no matter how many jokes he makes, or how many times he laughs.   
  
The guilt in Keith’s belly overwhelms him. He knows that he’s been caught in a lie, that he’s broken an important promise. But everything ended well anyway—he grew stronger. More capable. He became the sort of person who he thinks, now, might actually deserve to be with someone like Lance.   
  
If, he thinks, the process hadn’t ruined everything that they had.   
  
He sighs, crossing his arms over his chest. He looks from Lance to the lighted control panel, to the window again, to the bales of hay stacked in the corner. He probably would have adopted Kalternecker out to someone on another planet. Lance’s empathy, he thinks, is something that he might never grow mature enough to attain.   
  
Lance’s smile smooths out. He breathes in deeply, turning himself back around in his seat so that he’s facing the window once again. Keith meets his eyes in the reflection, and he feels, for a split second, as though nothing has cracked between them, as though they’re still the same people. As though nothing is broken or wrong or different at all.   
  
He takes one more step forward. He places both hands on the back of the pilot’s seat.   
  
“I’m sorry,” he says, “for leaving, and… and for not keeping my promise. I’m sorry for… for everything, really. Like, letting you deal with everything alone, and not telling you what was going on. And for—”   
  
“Being a jerk when you came back?”   
  
He almost laughs, but he nods instead, biting his lip in hopes of masking his smile.   
  
Lance spits a scoff, and Keith can see him narrowing his eyes in his reflection.   
  
“Even after getting “better”, you’re still a prickly grump. Do you know how long I fantasized about like—like, running to each other and scooping you up in my arms? Or like, I don’t know! Just having a nice reunion?! Something romantic? I don’t even think I could scoop you anymore!”   
  
Keith is grinning so wide now that it twinges at the apples of his cheeks. He hasn’t laughed in a very long time. He hasn’t felt so at ease, so understood, as though he doesn’t have to explain anything to anyone, since before he left for the Blade.   
  
“I could have scooped you instead,” he says, “I could scoop you now if you want.”   
  
Lance turns around so quickly in his seat that he’s nothing but a blur of color and motion, sending Keith the hottest glare that he’s ever received in his life over something so absolutely trivial.   
  
“ _I’m_ the scooper, got it? I accepted you as the best guy at the Garrison, and the best paladin, and the leader, but I am _not_ giving up being the scooper too!”   
  
And, with that, Keith can’t stop himself from laughing. He pulls his hands away from the pilot’s seat, clutching at his belly as the noises tumble out of him. He’s unpracticed and hoarse, and at first, Lance does nothing but glare at him, but after a moment, once the tears begin to prickle at the corners of his eyes, Lance begins to laugh along too.   
  
“I-it’s not funny, jerk!” Lance nearly squeaks, clipped and disjointed between his own giggles, “I really thought about it all the time! I-I told myself that it would be like a Disney movie or something—i-it’s not funny!”   
  
Gradually, they sober, and eventually, Keith is closer, close enough that they’re touching, close enough that Lance is able to coax him into his lap. They’re both dressed in their casual clothes again. Keith’s shirt is tight around his chest, the jacket so stuffy and uncomfortable over his broader shoulders that he’d opted to leave it in the Black Lion tonight. But Lance is wearing his, just like he always used to. Lance, sans the different look to his eyes—something inside of him aged beautifully into a prouder, more confident man—looks almost exactly the same as Keith remembers him. He’s still handsome, still smiling. He’s still looking at Keith as though he’s the most brilliant star in the entire universe.   
  
“You broke your promise,” Lance whispers, close enough that Keith can feel his words warm against his lips, against his cheeks, tingling from his ears all throughout his body, “You’re not supposed to break promises to lovers, Mr. Black Paladin.”   
  
His hands are at each of Keith’s hips. Keith can feel him further down. He can feel something there that sends a shiver up his spine. And he can feel Lance’s words, his voice, his breath, his _everything_ all around now, like a world and a home of his own. As though this hanger, this small, brightly lit room, it’s the central point of an entire universe, and the only existing inhabitants are the two of them.   
  
“You broke your promise too.” Keith rebukes, his lashes falling down and brushing against heated cheeks. His skin tingling with fire, his thighs trembling on either side of Lance, with his knees digging into the pilot’s seat. “Allura told me what happened to you. What she had to do.”   
  
To Lance’s credit, and Keith’s surprise, he doesn’t immediately balk at the accusation. He doesn’t argue or move about, or push Keith from his lap onto the floor. There’s none of the previous aggression or denial of clear, obvious facts that Keith might have found in him at one point. He doesn’t defend himself even when he knows that doing so is pointless. He only allows his soft smile to spread wider, his eyes to droop further closed.   
  
And his fingers against Keith’s hips press in slightly harder, but never rough enough that it actually hurts.   
  
“I did what I had to do,” he says, his voice a minuscule, pitiful thing among the hum of the machinery in front of them and Red’s quiet purrs in their heads, “Allura was in trouble. You would have done the same thing.”   
  
Keith presses his lips firmer together. He can’t argue with that, and Lance knows that he’s backed him into a corner. But Keith is far more focused on how different Lance is now, how the old Lance might have tried to play this off to seem less serious than it really was. How the old Lance might have lied to make it seem as though he’d been in total control of that chaotic situation.

He leans forward, and Lance welcomes his kiss. They rock together for a short lapse of heavy breaths and wandering hands on warm skin. Keith feels a rush of adrenaline fan out inside of him. He feels his skin tingling, and a need for something that he hasn’t felt in entirely too long lingering hot and heavy in his lower belly.

“I yelled at my mom for not letting the Galra kill me,” He says, filling the few inches that he creates between their lips, his voice wavering with emotion, with need, with the relief that he and Lance are both alive to touch right now at all, “They had a gun to the back of my head. She didn’t let them shoot me and bailed on the mission instead. I didn’t know that she was my mom yet. I thought she was just a really bad soldier.”

He can feel Lance’s touch radiating over every part of him that his fingers reach. He’s sliding his palms from Keith’s hips to his backside, pulling him firmer into his lap, forcing them together in just the way that Keith had been hoping that he would.

Keith bites his lip, Lance interrupts him with another kiss.

And, pulling away, he responds, “I jousted with a Galra sentry.”

Keith tugs himself back, the inertia of the previous mood rolling forward suddenly halted. He’s caught between laughter and confusion—wondering if Lance is just messing with him now. Wondering if this is some kind of inside joke that he’s not in on.

“W-what—”

“I did.” Lance cuts him off, smiling wide enough that Keith can see an entire row of pearly teeth peeking out from between his lips. “I mean, Pidge and Hunk reprogrammed it and I lost, but it was worth it. He made us ice cream after.”

Keith isn’t given an opportunity to sift through this information in his head, because then Lance is dragging his lips over his throat, grazing his teeth over the hot skin there, sucking just lightly enough that Keith doesn’t have to worry about finding any marks later on.

His hands are now cupping Keith’s backside, and he’s pushing himself upward—up high enough that Keith can feel the indentation of something firm between them. Grinding their hips together, digging his teeth just a little bit rougher into Keith’s skin.

And Keith continues their new game, despite the nerves skittering through his veins. Despite the heat of the room wrapping around them, despite how desperately he wishes that they could take this further, after all of the time that he’s already spent waiting for it.

“I—I lived on an alien whale’s back for two years.” He stumbles over these words, his tone breaking midway through the sentence as Lance’s long fingers inch underneath his shirt, tracing slow lines up the bumps of his spine. “I-I almost got myself blown up trying—trying to save a guy from the Blade, a-and I—I almost got blown up trying to save Shiro, I—”

Lance’s teeth graze neck, just below his ear, his fingers dipping just below his pantline in a swift, easy motion that has all of the words bubbling in his throat suddenly trapped there. He babbles something akin to a groan instead, dropping his head down into the dip of Lance’s shoulder as those hungry lips press against his hot cheek.

Lance’s other hand and those long fingers, they’re sneaking around his waist and fiddling with the fly of his pants. It’s been so long since anyone has touched him like this, since Lance, the only one who ever has, has touched him like this. He trembles as he listens to his own pulse pounding in his ears, his labored breathing, Lance’s breathy laughter as he unzips his fly.

It shouldn’t, but his skin feels even hotter as Lance slides his pants further down. Lance has seen all of him many times now. He’s touched him in these places, with fingers and his mouth. He’s kissed every inch of Keith’s skin alive with those soft lips. He knows Keith’s body—even bigger, different, and more scattered with scars.

Keith doesn’t know why suddenly, he feels as though they’re doing this for the very first time.

“I fought a dragon,” Lance whispers, and Keith doesn’t miss the hitch in his voice, “I-I mean… it was in _Monsters & Mana_, but it still counts. It was dangerous for… my character.”

His hands have pushed Keith’s pants down around his knees, as far as they’ll go where their bodies are pressed together. He’s trailing them now over the surface of Keith’s underwear, his nails skimming the fabric and sending skitters of excitement rolling in waves over Keith’s skin.

“We—”

Keith bites that off just as Lance’s fingers drag a long, slow stroke over his thighs. He can feel the familiar wetness between them, can feel the warmth radiating from the center of himself, but he tells himself that he isn’t embarrassed anymore.

His body, Lance had told him, is beautiful. Before Lance, no one had ever called him beautiful. In those words, or any words even remotely similar.

But now, on this pilot’s seat in the deep night on a barren, desert planet in Lance’s warm lap—Keith feels it. He feels as though he’s something worth being touched so gently. He feels as though he’s a person worthy of Lance’s lovingly soft smiles.

“W-we’re bad at this,” Keith says, in a breath more than a voice, in a hiss more than words, “At… at taking care of ourselves.”

And Lance laughs again, like wind chimes, like music. Like a home that Keith might have never imagined having to return to, before he opened himself up to someone like Lance.

“We just have to take care of each other,” Lance tells him, “You take care of me… I’ll take care of you.”

He emphasizes this with fingers crawling up under the leg of Keith’s boxers. He punctuates this sentence with the tip of just one of them, teasing Keith where he’s been aching to be touched.

Keith isn’t proud of the fact that he folds immediately into the sensation of it. He might have felt before as though all of his time spent away training should have taught him to be more patient and tactful in any given situation.

But Lance unravels him, just as he always has, and probably, Keith decides, just as he always will.

He’s squirming under Lance’s touch, grasping at his arms with shaking fists. His face, still pressed firmly into Lance’s shoulder, feels as though it’s been set aflame. He’s so warm now that he’s burning here, white-hot, so bright that he feels as though anyone outside should be able to see him shining through the Red Lion’s darkened eyes.

Lance whispers to him as he touches him—words that jumble together with his heartbeat, words that seem to melt in the boiling air. He’s kissing his cheeks, his hair, telling him that he’s gorgeous, that Lance missed him, that he’s an idiot but Lance loves him all the same. They’re tender words, spoken in a voice so soft that Keith feels as though he’s hearing them muted, from underwater. He feels as though he’s drowning in what Lance can make him feel. He feels as though, truly, the two of them have managed to transport themselves into this empty world, where the two of them can be normal. They can be in love. And for the rest of time, they can continue to do things just like this.

Lance makes him feel like forever is an attainable goal.

Lance allows him to fall apart in his strong, reliable arms.

Keith buries his final cries into Lance’s shoulder. He shudders with the force of the sensation rattling through him, the burst of a mysterious _something_ that shakes him, the feeling of spilling over after boiling for so long.

He can feel Lance then, still aroused and waiting, when he falls slack in his lap. But Lance waits for him to catch his breath before he says or does anything. For a moment that feels like far too long, he does nothing but kiss the top of Keith’s head now buried in his chest, and draw those wandering hands over his back in slow circles.

“Seems like you’ve missed this,” Lance says slyly, and only when Keith gains the strength to argue, adds, “I’ve missed it too.”

“It’s been years,” Keith says slowly, tired now, lax and boneless and awkwardly situated on Lance’s lap, “For me, it’s… been a lot longer.”

Lance has no way of understanding what that means, and he looks confused by it, despite the fact that he doesn’t ask for Keith to clarify. They’re toeing the edge of something here, refusing to commit to jumping over completely. Lance might consider it saving the less fun conversations for later. Lance might consider it to be more romantic if they wait until after they’re done to talk.

But Keith wonders how much time it’ll take to remeet. How many months and maybe even years that might be rolling out before them—that precious time that they’ll spend together in the future doing nothing but explaining every detail of the lives that they lived and the experiences that crafted them into these very different people in each other's absences.

He doesn’t have time to contemplate that now, just as Lance won’t give him time to apologize again, or to feel guilty for going away. Just as Lance has always been there, waiting to catch him when he falls into these cycles of doubt and self-hatred. Lance had told him, at one point, that he was made to be the Black Paladin. He’d told him that he trusted the lion’s judgment. That there must have been a reason for it, why an all-knowing creature would decide upon him, why Shiro himself had instilled all of his faith in someone like Keith.

Maybe, back then, Keith hadn’t been able to see it.

But Lance was right, just like he’s still right now. And maybe, all of the extra time that it’s taken Keith to find himself at the very same place, it’s just another good reason for him to spend just as much time making all of this up to Lance.

Lance is shuffling awkwardly with Keith still in his lap, and Keith makes an effort now that his limbs have become solid things that work again to hold himself up on one knee, bracing a hand over the opposite armrest as he pulls down his boxers the rest of the way. He allows them to hang from the other leg, doesn’t think more about them after he manages to free himself, because Lance is fiddling with a familiar packet that raises more pertinent questions than whether or not he’ll be comfortable doing this with half of his clothes still on.

“Why do you have that over here?”

Lance pauses, his fingers picking at the serrated corner of the plastic. His cheeks grow even pinker, his brows low and tight as he stares at it as though it’s betrayed him somehow.

“Lance,” Keith says then, and it’s hard to keep his voice firm and even, without the laughter at the mere absurdity of all of this tumbling through, “Do you… do you always keep condoms over here?”

 _Here_ , as in wherever Lance has plucked it from in Red’s pilot seat. _Here_ , as in on his person, and not hiding in one of his boxes of belongings anywhere else in the room.

Lance won’t meet his eyes, but he does manage to tear open the package without ripping the material inside. Keith’s eyes linger on it for a moment, something fluttering deep within his chest, before he flicks his gaze back to Lance’s reddened face.

“I—I grabbed it when you knocked!” Lance’s gaze is hot when he finally meets Keith’s eyes. “I just—I thought, you know, I thought maybe I’d need it! And I was right, right?! I needed it, so why does it matter why I had it?”

Keith decides not to argue all of the flaws of that assertion. He decides that, later on, he can tease Lance about assuming that they’d be doing this from the moment that Keith wandered over to talk to him. That, despite how angry and hurt he must have been, there must have been a part of him just as hungry and desperate for this as Keith is.

That he’d forgiven Keith before Keith had even garnered the nerve to apologize. He’d been waiting, all this time, without ever wavering in his decision to be a place that Keith could always come home to.

Keith reaches a hand forward, careful to stay steady in his precarious kneeling position on the edge of the seat. One hand grasps the condom and plucks it from the plastic. The other reaches down, and down, until he’s undressing Lance as well as he can from such an odd, limited angle. Lance hisses and bites his lip, looks out into the black night through the window as Keith pulls him out of his pants and begins to slide the condom on.

It’s not as slow as the first time, but Keith feels something lingering here. He feels an inkling of something small, growing larger, an indescribable sensation in his chest, as though this encounter is weighted too, by something that he can’t recognize.

It’s not the first time, the second, or third. It’s not their only experience doing this inside of one of the lions. It’s not abnormal in any sense of the word, but Keith finds it eventually, recognizes this feeling swelling inside of him for what it really is.

He lifts himself up higher, drawing in a few short, steadying breaths before lowering himself down onto Lance.

It’s the last time that he’s coming back after going away.

Tomorrow, he’ll wake up here, and he’ll stay with Lance, in this home that’s tethered them together until the day that he dies.

Forever, he thinks. Because with Lance, he knows, forever is a thing that’s really possible.

Lance’s hands have returned to his hips, steadying him as he takes all of Lance inside of him. It’s been a while, he’s reminded again and again, by the slight discomfort of it, by the peculiarity of this fullness. He breathes in and out, allows his eyes to fall closed. And Lance is there, suddenly, bridging the short gap between them with his lips against Keith’s lips.

Keith pulls himself up, stops, then slides down. He finds a comfortable angle and keeps going. Lance’s head falls back against the seat, his fingers tangling in the hem of Keith’s shirt as he trembles underneath. Keith can feel that familiar pressure building inside of him. He can feel a second wave of warmth rolling through his veins. He picks up speed, chasing the pleasure that he’s feeling here, drinking in Lance’s dizzy expression and the flush worked up under his skin. Admiring this person who’s waited for so long just to meet him once again, who’s been here, all this time, who’s grown and changed but somehow kept a place for Keith available in his heart.

The pressure within Keith releases. His eyes widen, he rattles off a moan. Lance is smiling even as he’s pushed closer to the edge. He’s tumbled over by the sensation of Keith tightening around him—head back, lips open, eyes screwed tightly shut.

They jump from that cliff together, tangled here on this pilot’s seat, in this silent, living ship. In the dark of the night on a barren alien planet. In the aftermath of a great battle that stole their only home away.

And they’re kissing again, Lance softened but still buried inside of Keith. They’re saying wet words, whispering in jagged tones. Keith feels alive with emotions that he doesn't quite know how to feel. He feels as though this moment might extend on forever and he hopes that it does. He prays that tomorrow, and every day onward, he can steal Lance away for times like these, together in the blur of this empty silence. Secluded in this private world without war, or loss, or anything but their hands and their skin, their lips and their loving, soft words.

They can continue to grow together, to grow old together.

And to live to see the end of this terrible war.

“I love you,” someone says.

“I love you too,” someone says back.

Lance’s lips are wet and soft and more than welcome when they press against his once again.

“This is a pretty good reason to stay alive, right?”

And Keith laughs at him, calls him gross. Tells him that there are far better reasons to stay safe than something like this.

But deep down, secretly, in a part of himself that he suspects that Lance might be able to see right through—

He agrees.

However, if Lance isn’t going to mention it, like many other more important things, Keith decides that maybe they’ll just have to talk about it later.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello there! Originally, this story was supposed to be a standalone thing, but the lovely [spoiledspine](https://spoiledspine.tumblr.com/) contacted me again with another great idea, and the two of us decided that it would fit very nicely within this universe. Their ideas are always so much fun to write, so I really hope that you guys enjoyed this as well!  
> Thanks so much for reading!  
> [tumblr](http://curionabang.tumblr.com), [twitter](https://twitter.com/MothIsland)


	3. Chapter 3

“It’s beautiful at night, I swear—absolutely gorgeous—you just have to see it for yourself!”

Keith isn’t sure that anything could ever be as breathtaking as Lance treading in front of him, leading him through a darkened forest of tropical trees, bathed in a halo of moonlight. He isn’t sure if the world is even capable of creating anything that could quite manage to ground him, to tether him to this reality quite as profoundly as Lance has, where he’s actually existing in the same wavelength as surely, an angel fallen from heaven just to drag him around to his favorite hangouts here on Earth, but…

He’s willing to give Lance a chance to prove him wrong. No matter how fruitless he thinks that this endeavor might be.

And it’s not that Varadero isn’t stunning. On the contrary, Keith thinks that it might be the only location on Earth and existing in any point in space that might hold a light to Lance’s soft smile right now—but that’s just the thing.

Nothing that he’s seen so far has quite managed to capture the picturesque, stunning work of art that Lance’s smile is right now. None of the hugs that he’s received from anyone on Earth have felt quite as warm. None of the laughter that he’s heard has sounded quite as musical, and nothing in all of his travels, in all of the places that he’s ventured from one point at the far end of this vast universe to the very most distant point, has ever had even the slightest chance to usurp Lance as somehow the most gorgeous thing that Keith had ever laid eyes on.

He thinks that maybe he’s just fallen too hard. Maybe, a younger version of himself might have called it puppy love.

But it’s been years now, long enough for the limerence to ebb away. Long enough for those butterflies to still and die away in his belly, if only these feelings inside of him weren’t as painfully genuine as he’d always suspected that they were.

For the first time, since returning to Earth and beginning to rebuild, Lance gave him a seashell from the beach. Just today, they were soaking in the sun. Lance’s uncle cooked lunch on a wide grill that they’d helped him drag down to the sandy beach. They’d lounged on soft, colorful towels and listened to the sloshing of the water against the shore. Lance had swam with his nephews, he’d splashed around in the ocean and beckoned Keith in with a smile so wide that Keith didn’t have the heart to turn him down.

They’d floated in the shallow parts of the water, faces turned up at a sky so wide and blue that it was rivaled only by the deep recesses of Lance’s gorgeous eyes.

Lance, eventually, had dug the hefty shell out of seemingly thin air. Keith, having never roved a beach for any apparent treasure—buried or otherwise—had absolutely no idea how he’d spotted it in all of the stinging salt and air bubbles blocking the underwater view.

But he’d procured it and waved it in front of Keith’s face. He’d asked Keith if he remembered all of the stories about his childhood, how his mother used to laugh at him for collecting seashells to listen to the ocean once he retired to his room for the night, as though he could never truly get his fill of spending time in the water. He’d listen to the ocean and he’d imagine being a fish. He’d imagine that life was more simple like that: just swimming, just existing at one point in a large ocean and toiling away all of his time on survival.

He’d told Keith that, back then, he’d thought that just focusing on staying alive must have been easier. But when he’d finally found himself in that position, he’d craved instead the strict, overbearing schedule of a human trying to keep their head above water.

And Keith, in not so many words, had told him, _“Of course I do. It’s not like you ever shut up about it.”_

Lance had puffed out his cheeks, his face growing darker as he feigned annoyance. They’ve never completely gotten rid of their snarky back and forth, but at this point in time, they pretend to be offended more than either of them actually mean it. Keith couldn’t stop his grin then, the small laugh that had escaped him. And even Lance had smiled wryly as he’d shoved the shell against Keith’s ear and told him to shut up and listen.

Keith didn’t have the heart to tell him that the only water that he could hear was all around them. That the only noise vibrating in his ears was his own staggered heartbeat because, for whatever reason, his pulse never learned to stop racing when Lance drew so close to him, when he felt Lance’s skin on his skin.

But now, they’ve pulled away from the hustle and bustle of Lance’s large, overwhelming family. Keith takes a long breath of relief, feeling vaguely guilty for how easily he’s become exhausted by the constant barrage of love and affection that Lance’s family sends his way. With his own mother, Keith’s often found comfort in the close distance that they keep. He feels revitalized by the fleeting smiles and the soft words. Their understanding detachment is the language of their mutual affection, their ability to stay in tune and communicate without hands touching too much, without words too loving that Keith doesn’t know how to respond.

Lance, too, knows when he’s getting too close. For many years, Keith thought that he must have been broken, for craving love just as much as he felt uncomfortable with it. But Lance and Krolia understand. The two of them together seem to be plotting how best to ease him into accepting their affections without becoming too overwhelmed by them,

Lance’s family isn’t bad. Keith doesn’t dislike them. He just doesn’t understand them, more often than not, and he never expects the touches before they come, never allows himself the opportunity to grow acclimated to them before someone else is dragging him in for a tight hug, or a clap on the back, or fingers ruffling through his hair.

He feels a whole lot like a cute puppy or kitten here. He feels like something small and huggable that Lance’s family can’t quite keep their hands off of for too long.

And Kosmo—he bites his lip, smothering laughter in the interest of not needing to have this conversation with Lance about personal space in relation to his family so soon after they’ve finally settled in. Kosmo is the worst off of all, but Keith reasons that he loves the attention just as much. He’s often seen these days flanked by toddlers, rolled over on his back and accepting belly rubs like a peasant reborn as a king, as though he’s been starved of love and attention and he’s determined to soak up as much of it as he possibly can now, when the war has finally faded into a peace that at one point might have seemed impossible to all of them.

But Krolia, Kosmo, and Lance’s family are all back home. They’re a half mile away, getting ready for bed. They’ve long-since retired from dinner and dessert, from the games that they play together in the evening, the jokes that they tell that still manage to go over Keith and his mom’s heads, the anecdotes and old stories that make Lance flush brightly and demand hurriedly that they change the subject.

Keith never had a family before he embarked on the mission into outer space. He never knew that he could feel so happy that he might explode. He hadn’t ever fantasized about this reality, one that he’d thought seemed too unreasonable, to fantastical to ever exist, where he’s loved by many people. Where he wakes up every morning to smiling faces, to welcoming voices. To a crowd of people, perpetually happy to see him, so pleased that he’s alive. And here, with nothing but himself to offer them.

But now, Lance is leading him forward through the trees and the regrowth of shrubbery where war had once torn through everything. It’s been a long time since they returned here—two years, if he’s exact—and after defeating the Galra, after venturing back out into a cold and broken outer space to defeat the scattered remains of the Galra empire, who’d scrambled to take control of the nation after Zarkon and Lotor’s deaths, they’d learned to create life instead of taking it.

They’d planted seeds and cultivated the birth of a new, intergalactic Earth. A planet with no boundaries, even in the sky.

And Keith, alone with Lance now, feels more tethered to this planet than he ever did before he took his first steps out into the unforgiving desert wilderness so many years ago, when the Garrison first expelled him.

Keith isn’t sure what he’d say to a younger version of himself now if he got the chance. He isn’t sure if any level of reassurance might have convinced a past him that things really could end as wonderfully as they have now.

“Just a little bit further,” Lance reassures him, “It’s right over this hill.”

Keith finds that he’s not in any hurry to find this secret haven that Lance has been whispering to him about since they came back here. He’s enjoying the warm night and the salty air, the hum of insects and the distant calls of nocturnal animals in a symphony of nature that he’s long-since grown unaccustomed to. He likes the crunch of the sand under his shoes, the feeling of it soft as it slides under the soles of his sandal-clad feet. Everything around them is alive and lush and growing. It’s a healthy world that they’ve watched flourish here. It’s a testament to all that they’ve accomplished, that their home could be such an oasis. That things can be quiet now, peaceful, and there’s no threat of danger lurking just around every corner anymore.

Overhead, Keith revels in the blanket of stars. In the deep, distant black of a universe sleeping just beyond the atmosphere. When he was young, it used to make him feel small and insignificant. It was terrifying thinking of the unknown lurking in those shadows, between the bright white of the stars, of a world beckoning him forward and beyond them. Of which societies he might encounter who, surely, wouldn’t understand him either.

Space, to a younger Keith, was a terrible, double-edged freedom. Escaping the clutches of a planet of people who would never and _could never_ manage to reach out to him, only to find himself tethered in yet another web of of dead-end relationships with people who he’d find, eventually, were far too different from himself to ever really accept him.

Lance, at one point, had told him that he was the rarest creature in the universe.

 _“But the gates are open now, aren’t they?”_ He’d laughed, winking coyly as he’d reached forward to run his fingers through Keith’s hair. _“I’m sure in a few years, a bunch of Galra-human kids are gonna be born. We’re gonna be up to our necks in tiny, angry little purple kids who think that they’re too cool to listen to authority.”_

Keith had wondered then if that would be a relief. He’d wondered if those children would also grow up feeling strange and too loud, too much for everyone else around them.

But Lance’s smile had softened. His fingers had stilled in the descent from Keith’s hair to his shoulder, resting gently against his heated cheek.

_“I bet none of them are gonna be anything like you. I doubt there’s anyone like you in the entire universe.”_

He’d said it like it was a good thing. Keith’s heart had thumped desperately in his chest.

He forces himself to stop thinking about this. He’s getting flustered because of it all over again.

They travel over the hill, through more thick throngs of trees. Lance leads the way slowly, patiently, waiting at all of the right intervals, when Keith lags behind, for him to catch up. He talks softly about this place where he’s leading Keith, about how he found it and how many times he used to wander out there as a kid. He tells Keith, in a voice so small and quiet that Keith can barely hear him over the crickets chirping around them, that when things got too hard to handle for a younger version of himself, he would always find solace in the way that the waves opened up against the rocky crags of the hillside, how the black sheet of water would reflect the moon like a perfect mirror. As though he might be able to dive down into the surface of it and find himself immersed in a duplicate image of his own life, standing in those black craters of the moon, staring back down at the solemn face of his that wished to reach somewhere further than this small town where, he says, nothing ever seemed to happen.

He used to wonder if he’d be able to pinpoint this spot while he was orbiting Earth in space. If, someday, he really would breach the atmosphere and plant his feet firmly on the surface of the moon. If his reflection in that pool would switch out, if this future version of himself could peer up through the flat black of the water and see himself, years ago, wishing for something more.

Keith is familiar with that sort of wanting. He used to do the same thing all the time, growing up. But it’s strange, hearing these words coming from Lance’s mouth, in his voice, in his own recollection of memories. It’s startling, to realize that at one point, they must have both been gazing up at the same stars, the same moon, the same distant shadows in the night sky, wishing to be literally anywhere else.

“It’s right here,” Lance tells him suddenly, reaching back and grasping him by the wrist, “Look, it’s almost as pretty as when I left, even with… well, you know.”

This place—beyond the branches and brush that Lance nudges to the side—has been virtually untouched by the devastation. It’s a gully surrounded by a thick forest of palm trees. It’s a sole oasis hidden among this greenery, so clear, so pristine and unpolluted that Keith can even see the fish skimming the sandy floor.

Lance steps forward, urging Keith along with him. It feels wrong, almost, to tread into this place that seems so undisturbed, but Keith would go just about anywhere with Lance right now. When his smile is so wide and contagious, while the moon is illuminating his skin in such a comely blue hue. He’s as gorgeous as ever now, as happy and at peace as Keith has ever seen him. This Lance—this quiet, happy, poignant Lance—is as close to perfect as Keith could ever imagine existing in human skin.

And in this moment, in this short lapse of heavy silence, Keith feels so overcome with a sudden wave of emotion that he nearly sways where he stands.

The gully is overlooked by a wide cliff. It isn’t particularly high up, maybe ten feet above the surface of the water, but Lance laughs when he recounts how it used to seem fifty stories high when he was a kid.

“I was ten before I got brave enough to jump from it.” He’s led them all the way to the edge before he settles down with his backside in the grass. He smiles up at Keith then, squinted eyes, low brows, cheeks pushed up high with how wide he’s grinning, teeth glistening in the moonlight. “God, the water was so warm—I bet it still is. Sometimes I’d sneak out here and, you know… kids at school used to talk about skinny dipping, but I was never brave enough to do it. I always told myself that someday I’d come back here and swim naked with some cutie who was super impressed with me being a pilot.”

He’s laughing again. He’s allowed his hand to slip from Keith’s. And his eyes turn back to the water, to the black sheet of it reflecting the moon. Keith tries to imagine what it must have felt like being a child lost in a huge family. He wonders what Lance must have yearned for. To stand out? Maybe. To embark on some fantastical adventure? It doesn’t seem out of character for someone like Lance.

Or maybe… to find somewhere where he finally belongs?

Keith can’t say that he can’t relate.

He draws in a deep breath, smoothing his hands over his clothes. And he watches Lance’s turned back, tips his head to the side and listens to the hum of life in the dark trees around them. The water below is still enough that it really does seem to be a mirror. He almost feels bad—almost—when he pulls his shirt over his head, shuffling out of his pants and his sandals and bounding past Lance quicker than he can talk himself out of it.

He leaps from the edge of the cliff, tucking his head into his knees as he hears the crack of Lance’s panicked yell cracking through the quiet.

There’s a single moment of air and quiet and the reverberation of his heart pounding in his ears.

A split second where his stomach drops and he falls from the sky—down, and down, barreling quickly towards the glassy sheet of dark water.

But the surface of it welcomes him, warm, and dark, and quiet. It separates around him, like arms opening wide for a big hug. Then it seals over the hole that he’s made inside of it, covers over him. Closes tightly and encapsulates him in this warmth and wetness and the deafness of the water filling his ears.

He plunges so deep under that his feet touch the soft floor.

And when he swims upward, when he breaches the surface and wipes the salty water from his eyes, he grins up at a flabbergasted Lance—now grasping at the edge of the cliff and staring down at him with wide eyes, a slack jaw, and cheeks so unmistakably pink that Keith can even make out his flush in the dark.

“K—Keith, holy crow, dude! Are you crazy?! Wh—what the heck was that?!”

Keith allows himself to go slack in the water. He remembers, from a distant past and so many more recent memories of exploring ocean planets in space, how to float on his back. He does so unabashedly. He knows that Lance has seen him naked many times now. He’s not ashamed of the scars littering his body, like the points of constellations spread out over his skin. He isn’t embarrassed about the way that his skin seems translucent in the glow of the moon, how he’s bigger than he used to be, how their time back on Earth has worn away some of his muscle, added more weight to his thighs and hips than he remembers being there while they were still getting consistent exercise and eating meals that weren’t so loaded with calories.

Lance is contented with him, he knows. Lance will love him, always, with the scars and his newfound softness. Even naked and soaked, even gazing up at him now with the most sardonic smile that he can muster when he feels so terribly comfortable here.

“You said you wanted to swim in here naked, right? Well, what’s stopping you?”

Lance shakes his head so quickly that his face is a blur. Keith can’t help but laugh at his surprise, moving his arms in slow, wide motions in the water to move himself further into the belly of the gully.

“The water feels great,” he says, blithe and cavalier as he’s ever been, “You’re really missing out, Lance. I can’t believe you’re still too afraid to jump.”

Lance’s cheeks are immediately two shades darker. He’s stumbling over his words, shoving himself up from the ledge and onto his feet in quick, jerky motions.

“I-I’m not scared, okay?! I—I just didn’t expect for you to—to just… just _jump right in_ like that! I thought you were done being reckless, alright?!”

Keith spits another laugh.

“ _Reckless_ as in… jumping ten feet into some water? You’re already going soft, Lance. We haven’t even been home for two years yet and you’re already afraid of a little jump?”

“I—It’s been twenty-two months!” Lance’s voice is shrill even as he tries to keep quiet. Despite how secluded this place seems to be, Keith can still hear the crashing waves from the beach some ways away, just beyond the canopy of trees. “And I’m not going soft, alright?! I just… I’m not scared!”

“Then come in.”

Lance seems so flustered now that the heat of his cheeks could set this whole forest on fire. Keith’s having a lot of trouble masking his smile, but somehow, he perseveres.

Lance unbuttons his shirt quickly, fumbling with the buttons in his frustration. He practically rips it over his shoulders, tossing it blindly behind him before tearing down the zipper of his shorts.

The shoes come off last, which proves to be a mistake, as he has trouble stepping out of his shorts with them on, but Keith pretends that he isn’t paying attention. He knows that Lance flounders awkwardly when he’s put under social pressure. And the point now isn’t to humiliate him. It isn’t to make him uncomfortable or call him names.

Right now, Keith wants nothing more than to see what all of that soft, naked skin might look like in the moonlight, in the water here, and how it might feel under his fingertips.

His heart is thrumming, full to the brim. He can’t articulate how all of this makes him feel now, Lance bringing him to this place, which meant so much to him as a kid. Lance, sharing a final piece of himself with Keith without question, excitedly, even, if Keith allows himself to be cocky. If he admits to himself, once and for all, that perhaps he really has managed to land himself the exclusive role as Lance’s favorite person.

The person, he thinks, with so much more emotion than he knows what to do with, who Lance wants to share everything with, past and future and all of these wonderful, fleeting moments between.

Lance is still grumbling his residual complaints once he finally gets fully undressed. He glowers down at Keith one more time, mentioning in a low, grumpy voice, “I’m not gonna do a cannonball like you though, showoff. Do you know how noisy you were? What are you gonna do when someone comes over here to check out what the ruckus is?”

Keith can’t help but crack a smile at Lance’s odd use of the word “ruckus”, asking Lance slyly if Voltron has really aged him so much that he’s already started talking like an old man. But Lance ignores him and makes a very obvious point of ignoring him, as he takes a few steps back. He draws in a deep breath that Keith can see expanding his chest, stretching skin over prominent rib bone, raising his shoulders and working a wave straight through him. Keith takes a moment—the short respite that he finds in this warm, dark silence—to admire the muscles and the scars. Lance glows in the moonlight like a fallen star. He’s brighter and softer and far more beautiful than anything that Keith was expecting to find here tonight.

He wonders if Lance knows how perfect he is. He wonders if Lance realizes that he’s better than anyone else.

Probably not, he thinks. Despite his bravado, despite the shield of manufactured cockiness that he wraps around himself, Keith knows that Lance would never be that proud.

Or even that realistic. Or a person with eyes who can clearly see his own reflection, hear himself laugh, and think all of the thoughts that compel him to do every single wonderful thing that he does.

But now, Lance is running forward. He leaps from the edge of the cliff, and Keith scrambles to move out of the way as he dives down. It’s perfect form, Keith thinks—reminiscent of all of the divers who Keith has seen in the Olympics in passing on television screens. It’s graceful and poised, and the small splash that Lance leaves in his wake as he breaches the surface is so quiet that Keith can barely hear it over the chatter of the night creatures around them.

When Lance breaches the surface, Keith reaches out to him. He’s drawn closer by Lance’s hands pulling him, those long fingers wrapping around his wrists almost two times each. His eyes are hooded, his lashes dark in the night, sticking together with moisture as a smile tugs at the corners of his lips.

Keith allows himself to be pulled closer, his chest only centimeters from Lance’s, their faces coming nearer and nearer, until Lance presses his forehead to Keith’s.

They sit in the quiet for a moment after that. Keith enjoys the feeling of Lance’s hands on him, enjoys the warmth of Lance’s breath on his cheeks, his shadowed eyes like the dark sky, drawing him in. Keith feels compelled to Lance’s eyes much how he’d felt drawn into the starry night when he was a kid. He feels now, as though all of his focus has switched from one thing to another, from searching the endless boundaries of the universe for a place where he belongs, to spending an eternity locked in this one, single moment with Lance all around him.

And he breathes in, allows his eyes to drop closed.

Lance’s lips are wet and soft when they catch his. It’s a gentle kiss, a slow press of lips together. It isn’t ravenous or eager. It isn’t lewd in any sense of the word. Keith feels heat roving over his skin, feels himself thrumming with a hot energy that he can barely understand.

But he feels drunk on this moment, on Lance’s skin, his lips, his dark eyes. He feels lightheaded and dopey, dizzied and directionless, as though he’s floating aimlessly in the summer air.

Lance breathes a quiet laugh. He tugs his chin upward, placing his lips on Keith’s forehead.

His fingers have released Keith’s wrists. They’re twining together with Keith’s fingers, holding both of his hands just under the surface of the water.

Keith leans in, kisses a gradual trail along the tapered edges of a long scar rippled over Lance’s shoulder. The skin there is lighter, glistening in the dim light like silver buried under sand. It feels smoother than the rest of Lance’s skin, worn away and regrown tighter. Lance laughs, tells him quietly that his hair is tickling him.

His nose is buried in Keith’s wet hair. His words feel warm against Keith’s scalp.

“I can’t believe you’re here,” Lance whispers, “I mean—I always thought I’d get around to bringing someone here eventually, but… it’s you, and that’s—that’s so… crazy. Like out of everyone in the whole universe, somehow you ended up choosing me.”

Keith pulls back, cocking his head to the side and raising both brows.

“You chose me too.”

Lance’s smile is warm, his cheeks brushed scarlet. His fingers lace tighter between Keith’s, and his pulse, connected between their hands, picks up speed, amplifies. Keith isn’t sure why he’s suddenly so nervous. Right now, Keith feels nothing but contented, but calm, but at total peace in a world where he’d never before felt comfortable in his own skin before this.

But with Lance, here, He feels safe. He feels as though, maybe, all of the fighting, the war, the anguish, maybe it’s been worth it, if only they can have this moment, right now, all to himself.

“I want to spend the rest of my life with you,” Lance tells him, “I wanna be with you until I’m old.”

And Keith understands it, abruptly. Immediately, as though a switch has been flipped inside of him, his heart is a racket in his chest, his cheeks feel hot, and his palms, thankfully still underwater, feel as though they might be sweating despite it.

“Lance—”

“I wanna marry you, Keith. I wanna be with you forever.”

And the night sky above them feels big and wide and endless. The trees are dark and shuddering with a resonant chirping of nocturnal life. The waves in the distance, the faraway crashing of water to the shore. The twinkling, white stars, the lively green of palm leaves. The soft sand resting on the ocean floor, and the fish swimming circles far below.

Keith feels intoxicated here, in the nature, in the night, in this moment with Lance, so warm and safe and so happily surrounded by family and friends and so many people who love him unconditionally.

He peers up into Lance’s dark eyes. He takes in the water trailing from his messy bangs, the lopsided smile on his lips. The dip of his high cheekbones into the shallow slopes of his cheeks, the sharp point of his chin. He takes in the golden glow of Lance’s skin, like a sole sun in this darkness, like the only thing in the entire universe that can possibly cool him down and heat things up all at once.

The only thing that Keith has ever encountered that somehow manages to confuse him while still making perfect sense.

Keith loves Lance. He loves him more than he ever would have thought that a person could love another person. He loves him so much that he feels as though his heart might explode, right here, right now, in a moment so perfect that he wishes that it could last forever.

And forever, Lance offers him now. Lance watches him nervously, as though he’d ever be stupid enough to say no.

“I want to marry you too,” Keith says, slowly, quietly, embarrassed by the crack in his voice, the wetness in his eyes, the throbbing in his chest, “I… I want to be with you forever too.”

Lance kisses him again. Lance holds him close and he’s so soft and warm. Lance laughs with dampness in his eyes. He laughs as though he’s never been happier in his whole life.

In this night, in this dark, in this secret, perfect oasis, Keith welcomes the rest of his life. He welcomes loud dinners with Lance’s big family. He welcomes the ensuing phone call with Shiro, to tell him the big news. He welcomes a new chapter of his story, of getting to know all of these people who live in this bright, happy place. Of rebuilding. Of being happy, and normal, and surrounded only by love.

And despite this moment, this island, these people, and this secret gully just beyond the thick canvas of trees, hidden from the view of the beach.

Keith can’t help but think that he was right all along.

Nothing that he’ll ever see for the rest of his life will ever be more beautiful than Lance is tonight.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks so much, once again, to [spoiledspine](http://spoiledspine.tumblr.com) for requesting a third part to this! As always, it was a huge treat to be able to add more to this universe!
> 
> And, of course, to my beta, [Mai](http://paladong-s.tumblr.com), for taking the time to look over this very, very short notice.
> 
> I hope you enjoyed it!


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